FEATURE: Despite impressive success for the national teams, participation on the grassroots level in Denmark plummets. Now the DHF has launched a 1.2 million euro-strong campaign to stop the downward trend

DHF invests 1.2 million euro in grassroots handball campaign

Danish handball is a success story, when you talk about the top of the top.

The men’s national team won silver at a successful EHF EURO 2014 on home ground with attracted huge interest from fans, spectators and media alike in January, and the women took bronze at the World Championship in Serbia in December last year.

However, despite this success, the Danish Handball Federation (DHF) has lost around 2,000 members every year over the past ten years.

This may come as a surprise, as successful national teams should provide sufficient role models for young people.

"But this is not the way it works. Actually, a PHD thesis we analysed concluded that there is no direct connection between success for the elite and the inrush of new players.

"When (Danish tennis player) Caroline Wozniacki was no.1 in the world, many people did start to play tennis, but the number soon dropped to the level before.”

The man saying this is Lars Brønserud, head of the DHF’s new project “Break the Curve” (Knaek Kurven in Danish), a campaign that has just been launched and which runs until the end of 2017.

How seriously the decrease in the number of active handball players is taken by the federation is emphasised by the fact that 8.4 million Danish kroner, close to 1.2 million euro, are being invested.

"The records show that all organised sports in the country are losing members," Lars Brønserud tells eurohandball.com.

"To me and – I dare say – to Danish Handball it will be a huge success, if we can make the curve become stagnant and hold on to the number of handball players we have here and now," Jørgen Rolander, Vice President in the Danish Handball Federation recently told the federation´s official magazine Håndbold and Brønderud confirms this objective.

"Yes, our first aim is to stop the fall in the number of players. After that we can hopefully get further," he says.

Primary goal: Get the clubs involved

The campaign consists of four main fields: Handball in schools, club building, the age group 2000/01 and education of mentors.

"Out of those, club building is the central part, as it is all about getting the clubs involved," explains Brønserud.

Club building in this respect consists of three steps, called ‘running the club’, ‘strategy for volunteers’ and ‘developing the handball product’.

‘Running the club’ includes working out a plan for the year in the club and a description of the various tasks in a handball club. “That can be simple things such as player lists, getting teams signed up for tournaments, calling general assemblies etc.” says Brønserud.

The strategy for volunteers focuses on attracting and keeping voluntary coaches, officials, board members etc.

"Recent research has shown that there have never been so many people doing voluntary work in Denmark, as there are right now, and it is a question of benefitting from that.

"It is a question of telling people exactly what task they are asked to take on them, and how much time they will need to spend on it. If you do that, it is pretty easy to get volunteers," says Brønserud.

"Developing the handball product is a question of what the clubs have to offer. Often people stop playing handball because it was not what they expected.

"The training may have been too hard, or they may have been separated from their friends, because the elite is separated from the rest of the club, or they may simply have found other interests.

"Those are all things we have to look at, as it is not only a question of getting people to play handball in our clubs, but also to keep them there," emphasises Brønserud.

"Regarding handball in schools we would like the clubs to approach the schools and introduce them to handball.

"We have good relations to schools already, and we would like to extend that, for instance by showing that handball does not only have to be played the way they see it on TV on a 20x40 metre court, but for example as four against four on a smaller court.

"Here we also use softer balls like the ones used in street handball in order not to scare the kids away."

The purpose of the project concerning the potential players born in 2000 and 2001 is to analyse the habits and wishes of those who are entering their teenage years right now.

Holding on to the teenagers

"All experience shows that the largest defection arises when the kids become teenagers. This does not only apply to handball, but also to football and to all other team sports.

"In order to try and prevent this we want to find out what the players of that age want. For that purpose we hope to get 1000 players from that age group to take part in an ongoing survey, says Lars Brønserud.

"The idea behind the last point, educating mentors, is that many experienced coaches may have retired from active duty, because they no longer have the time to coach a team of their own, but they may still have some hours to spare.

"We would like to educate those to be mentors for coaches who could benefit from having a mentor to support and guide them," he explains.

A successful start

Losing 20,000 handball players over ten years in a country with a population of less than 5.7 million people calls for an initiative to break the negative trend, and so far the campaign seems to become a success.

"We have had kick-off events in six places all over Denmark in the spring, and we have been extremely well received everywhere.

"In the near future we are going to visit more than 450 clubs, and 230 clubs have already signed up for the project club building, while more than 600 teenagers have signed up for the project with the age group 2000/01," states Lars Brønserud.